PT. ii. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Buckle. 91 



the World. It is the second step in Mr. Darwin's 

 theory, the proof of which it seems to me he fails 

 to establish that this struggle for food is the cause 

 of all those countless varieties of organised beings 

 which people the earth. We do not dispute that 

 the progeny of a pair of elephants in five hundred 

 years might amount to fifteen millions, or that the 

 spawn of a single herring might in the same period 

 produce a number of descendants which it would tax 

 the ocean to contain or the powers of arithmetic to 

 enumerate. What we do dispute is, that by any chain 

 of descent, of which we have knowledge, the elephants 

 can have been the progenitors of the herrings, or the 

 herrings of the elephants. This I conceive to be 

 Mr. Darwin's theory, for although he may not under- 

 take to affirm in what degree of consanguinity the 

 herrings and the elephants stand to each other, yet 

 he does assert that all organised and animated Life 

 flows from one source, and is, in fact, related together. 

 He also conceives that this relation follows from 

 no action of a Superior Will, but from an involun- ' 

 tary and unavoidable sequence of cause and effect. 

 Now the first part is proved with figures ; it is arith- 

 metically true, indeed, and proves itself; but his 

 second proposition does not follow the least from the 



